Thinking Globally: Mandeville, Memory, and Mappaemundi

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: THE TRAVELS OF Sir John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century "first-person" account of a fictional English knight's adventurous journey to Jerusalem and across the world, is difficult to teach.1 Popular with medieval European audiences, the book troubles today's students with its confusing descriptions of global geography, its treatment of non-Christian, non-European peoples, and its constant conflation of fact and fable. But, as those who have taught it can attest, it can serve as a valuable tool for challenging students' preconceptions of an isolated European Middle Ages. It introduces them to an unreliable narrator and to tensions between the doctrines of the institutional Roman church and individual faith. The author's global perspective shows students a world of diverse religions, ethnicities, races, diets, customs, and sexualities. And the Travels does this while being relatively short and entertaining, pulling the reader through the map via its engaging narrative of landscaped vignettes.